Your Mystery and Thriller Book Bargains for October 20, 2020

Years ago, Ray was sworn to silence. Now he’s going to speak. Even if it kills him.

Ray Watts is in a deep funk. His girlfriend Liz has abandoned him. So has the muse that inspired the art that supported him. If he doesn’t come up with the next mortgage payment he’s going to be out on the street. In a moment of desperation, he googles his ex-wife Susan. They haven’t spoken in years. Now they never will—she died last year in a fiery car crash. Ray becomes obsessed with the years they spent together in a spiritual group— a time that drove him to the edge and destroyed their marriage.

But Ray has a plan. When you’re forbidden to speak, you end up with a lot of secrets. Juicy ones. So, he’ll write a best-selling book about his time in the group and pay off the mortgage. And writing will get him out of his funk. It’s what he’d always done—transmute his leaden troubles into the gold of art.

It’s 1978 in Bakersfield, California. Suzanne, a widow who escaped a rough-and-tumble childhood in the oil fields, is struggling to raise her teenage son, Danny. When she discovers the stabbed, beaten body of her neighbor, Reggie, she conceals evidence Danny may have attended the all-male party where Reggie died.

More murders occur. Danny falls under suspicion, and becomes trapped in the coils of The Club, a group of powerful men in law enforcement and media who abuse vulnerable teens. Suzanne launches a fight that puts everything at risk–home, job, and a new love–to save her son.

Category: Thrillers – Psychological

Mona Moon is not your typical young lady. She is a cartographer by trade, explorer by nature, and adventurer by heart. But there’s a problem.
Miss Mona is broke. It’s during the Depression, and National Geographic has just turned down her application to join an expedition to the Amazon. What’s she to do? Perhaps get a job as a department store salesgirl. Anything to tide her over until a next assignment. There’s a knock on the door. Who could this be in the middle of the night? Holding a revolver, Mona reluctantly opens her door to a man wearing a Homburg hat and holding a briefcase. “I bring glad tidings. Your Uncle Manfred Moon has died and left you as his heir to the Moon fortune. You are now one of the richest women in the country!” he says. Mona’s response is to point her revolver in his face. If the stranger is telling the truth, she will apologize. If he is a fraud, she will shoot him. That’s how Mona does things in 1933.

Other Retailers
Apple | Nook

Category: Mystery – Women Sleuths

A CrimeReads Best Book of the Year. All love stories are ghost stories in disguise. In Victorian England, a post-mortem photographer unearths the dark secrets of a famed poet’s marriage in this sensual, twisting gothic mystery in the tradition of Diane Setterfield’s THE THIRTEENTH TALE and Emily Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS. “A surrealist, haunting tale of suspense where every prediction turns out to be merely a step toward a bigger reveal.”—Booklist. Kirkus starred review.

Other Retailers
Apple | Nook | Kobo

Category: Mystery – Historical

ROOT AND BRANCH is a realistic thriller set in a near-future America where an Islamist-inspired intifada triggers emergency security measures that go terribly wrong.
Roger Zorn, owner of a French private security company, is delighted at having won a lucrative contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of the government’s new program of emergency security measures. The measures are launched when the U.S. military response to sneak attacks by Iran and Pakistan on America’s electrical grid provokes a wave of Jihadist-inspired violence across the U.S.A.
Zorn’s work for DHS requires him to apply his company’s Triage risk assessment technology to evaluate terrorist suspects captured in the U.S. and sort out the jihadists from nonviolent Muslim residents. But when Zorn’s inquiries lead him to discover that DHS and its lead contractor have been manipulating Triage scores to deport massive numbers of Muslims and is ‘disappearing’ the most violent ones, Zorn faces a choice.
Will he say nothing and sell his company to DHS’s prime contractor before scandal breaks, or will Zorn step up to expose the abuses and risk bringing the full wrath of America’s national security establishment down on his head?

Category: Thrillers – Political

Shortly after detective Paxton takes on the case of Stella Hughes, he realizes this is no ordinary murder. It becomes clear very quickly that Stella, the girl Paxton had known, was the victim of another serial killer – a theory that’s quickly confirmed by a bright, quirky journalist named Marcy.

Category: Mystery – Private Investigators